To track the intended -- and more importantly, unintended -- consequences of policies,market movements,buyout deals and regulatory censure. This forum will map the multiplier effect of what may seem minor events initially but spread out far and wide.

12/07/2010

Tale of two companies: part 1: College students to the rescue of NYC busy bees

This is the first of this two-part series on innovative start-up business ideas in the city of New York that carry the smell of crisp entrepreneurship. Both these firms identified a very basic missing link for smooth functioning of life, in one instance; financial markets in the another and plugged it. Here's their story:

A tiny web start-up called Agent Anything Inc., is plugging New Yorkers with “100 hour work weeks” with college students who are willing to finish their chores and run their errands in return for for petty cash.

Balancing the classic trade-off between either having time or money – but never both together – busy New Yorkers can “create missions” on www.agentanything.com and it is completed by a student “agent” in a jiffy.

Its 23-year old founder Harry Schiff describes the venture as an “eBay of services”. Started in September this year, the platform in its first two months alone has roped in roughly 800 clients with “missions” to dish out –a glorified term for sometimes whacky but mostly drab chores -- and 1000 agents willing to run them.

Source: www.agentanything.com“I realized there are senior citizens, mothers with babies or merchant bankers with 100-hour work weeks who have a to-do list that rolls over everyday. They will gladly pay $10-20-or-30 just to get rid of these jobs. On the other hand, there are these college students who are notoriously low on cash with time to spare,” said Schiff, who hit upon the idea about a year and a half ago when he was a psychology graduate student in the Princeton University.

The tasks run from the mundane – pick up curtains for $20, distribute flyers, walk the pet, unpack and clean for $100 – to more esoteric projects – creating a Wikipedia entry for $30, helping on ‘managerial economics’ homework – and sometimes plain hilarious ones. A lady put up $15 for any one to help find “at least 3 live and healthy land (garden) snails” for her daughter's school project. Someone once posted for an agent “to help convince my friend that Bon Jovi is cool.”

Some of these are “virtual missions” and can be done by any student anywhere in US working out of his laptop or phone – such as data entry or $10 for “finding an unemployed person on government benefits” – while others need to be done in person.

Shawn Hughey, a small business owner in downtown Manhattan who posted a mission on Thanksgiving last week, wants someone to “check on project installation in midtown several times over the next six weeks.” His request for “recurring missions as distinct from one-off requests” is one of the new features that Schiff says they are working on to introduce soon.

In what is essentially the new-age, grown-up and tech-savvy version of going over to your next door neighbour and offering to mow their lawn for small money, this disarmingly simple business concept is catching on, with nearly 260 finished missions at last count.

Competition is sprouting up. TaskRabbit Inc., a firm that currently operates in Boston and San Francisco, is now looking to enter New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles. So far, the territory has virgin, divided and there has been more work that needs to be done in urban lives than runners available.

Screening and filtering , however, is a kill-joy but essential part of the venture. Schiff recalls how they had to pull down a request for “washing and grooming my 392 ferocious dogs.” Another time, the web team ran into an awkwardly-worded request: “I need to someone to come to my house and change a light bulb. Please come, it is very dark in here. If there is food in the fridge, you can have it too.” “You know when someone is messing with you. You just have to take it down,” said Schiff.

The clients pay with their credit card for the finished tasks and a $2.5-$6 service fee. The agents are hired after they show a valid university id since Schiff believes the “university would have done the entire background check and would have their all details.” Ask him about foreign students running missions without a valid work visa and he turns defensive: “The contract is between the client and the agent. We just tell the students that they should have all the documents that they need to do any other usual job here.”

The service is available only in New York currently but is looking to expand to New Jersey, Long Island and Connecticut. “Any big-sized city with a good public transport system (for the students), massive internet penetration (for the clients) will be a good fit,” explained Schiff.

Agent Anything was financed so far with a “few thousand dollars” investment from Schiff’s personal resources and he is in the process of tying in the second round of finances, details of which he declined.

Expanding too fast and tripping on execution is something that Schiff is specifically keen to avoid. “We are always asked why not hire any unemployed person to run these missions? I tell him background checks are costly and we need to resist the temptation of adding agents just to take on more missions,” he said, “We have to make sure we don’t become a Craigslist. Sketchy, opaque and no one knows for sure what’s on offer.”